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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Ramona (Biograph, 1910)

The event last night in San Diego’s Old
Town was a commemoration of the Adobe Chapel on Conde Street, which apparently
was the first dedicated Roman Catholic church in San Diego after the Mexican
War and had a convoluted history, which was presented on a leaflet they gave at
the showing. The film was a 16 ½-minute adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s
novel Ramona, directed by D. W.
Griffith and starring the 17-year-old Mary Pickford as Ramona from “the great
Spanish house of Moreno” and Henry B. Walthall (later the “little colonel” in The
Birth of a Nation) as Alessandro, a Native
American with whom Ramona falls in love even though that costs her her life as
a Spanish grandee’s daughter. Helen Hunt Jackson was a New Englander by birth
and a friend of the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (though Jackson far
outlived Dickinson) who, like Verdi, was permanently scarred by the loss of her
young spouse and their two children. She achieved her reputation as a writer of
romantic potboilers, moved to Colorado for her health, remarried and became
aware of the mistreatment of American Indians at the hands of white soldiers
and settlers. In 1881 she published a nonfiction attack on the U.S.’s Indian
policy with the incendiary title A Century of Dishonor, but it sold poorly, and the message Jackson got
was that in order to bring Native American rights front and center to the
American political discourse, she’d have to do what Harriet Beecher Stowe had
done with slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: write a novel with all her skills at creating romantic tearjerkers and
move people through their hearts instead of their brains. Ramona was an instant hit, but unlike Uncle Tom’s
Cabin it wasn’t a political
success; instead it became a massive inducement to tourism in Southern
California. Since Jackson had set her tale in real locations and given them
their actual names — and apparently she based the characters of Ramona and
Alessandro on a Native couple that had been married by the priest who was her
technical advisor (so to speak) — promoters were able to stage Ramona pageants and offer Ramona tours. John D. Spreckels said that the big Mexican
estate in San Diego he had just bought was the location of Ramona’s and
Alessandro’s wedding — and the priest who’d worked with Jackson and actually
married the real-life models for her characters said no, it wasn’t.

In 1910 the
American Biograph company paid Jackson’s publisher, Little, Brown, $100 for the
movie rights to Ramona and
assigned the film to Griffith as director and Pickford and Walthall as stars —
but none of the people were
credited on screen, because as one of the seven companies of the Motion Picture
Trust (the ones that had been licensed by Thomas A. Edison to use his patented
movie camera and projector technology) Biograph had pledged not to bill any of the people who made their films, on the ground
that they didn’t want the movies to adopt the “star system” that had become
common in live theatre, where the leading players were able to make high
salaries because people knew who they were and wanted to see them. We all know
how well that turned out — starting in
1912, when Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, lured a winsome young actress
previously known only as “The Biograph Girl” to his independent (and
patent-breaking) company by offering to bill her under her real name, Florence
Lawrence (that really was her name, not the sort of made-up star pseudonym that became common
later!), movie actors got billing and were able to build up the followings that
made more money for their studios as well as themselves — but in 1910 the rule
was still that a movie just appeared with no clue on the titles as to who made
it or who those people on screen really were. What’s more, Ramona was made only one year after Griffith started his
career as a director with Rescued from the Eagle’s Nest in 1909, and it’s still a quite primitive movie:
there are few of the luminous close-ups that later became a hallmark of his
style, none of the quick cutting between scenes taking place in different
locations at the same time, and a real disappointment when one of the most
tragic scenes in his highlights-adaptation of the book (at 16 ½ minutes he
could hardly do justice to the whole thing!), the burning of Alessandro’s
native village by white settlers, is represented by nothing more than a plume
of smoke coming up from the floor of a canyon and a few men on horseback and a
horse-drawn wagon passing by on a road about midway down the canyon wall. One
aches for the way the director of The Birth of a Nation could have depicted this action just five years
later (and on a bigger budget than Biograph was handing its directors in
1910!).

Ramona was billed by Biograph as
the most expensive movie made to its time (which it might have been if one only
considers American movies; no U.S. studio had
yet produced a film longer than two reels, or about 20 minutes, but the French
had already made the world’s first feature film, The Assassination of the
Duke of Guise, in 1908 and hired a major
“name” composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, to provide the background music to be
played live in the theatre as it screened) and the first film ever made on
location: the credits ballyhooed that it was “taken at Camulos, Ventura County,
California, the actual scenes where Mrs. Jackson placed her characters in the
story.” Apparently at least some of it was shot in San Diego as well; the whole
point of screening it at the Adobe Chapel was that the building supposedly
appeared in the movie— though the only glimpse of anything that could have been it was the scene in which the priest who
married Ramona and Alessandro sends them on their way after the ceremony. (The
real priest who had traveled through the Indian country with Helen Hunt Jackson
and married the real-life models for Ramona and Alessandro pointed out that no
Roman Catholic priest would marry a couple outdoors, as John Spreckels claimed they had and as it was
depicted in the Ramona
pageants, and in 1910 D. W. Griffith couldn’t have filmed the ceremony in the
actual chapel because artificial lights weren’t yet being used in filmmaking:
all films were illuminated by daylight and interiors were sets with walls and
floors but not ceilings. Various sorts of cloth were held up over the tops of
these sets to control the intensity of light so the early cinematographers —
including Griffith’s favorite, G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, who shot this film — could
get an appealing and properly exposed image.) Ramona is not only primitively directed but mostly
abominably overacted; scenes that cried out for restraint get the hideous
hands-over-heads, deep-furrowed grimacing and all the rest of the dreadful
gestures early silent-film actors fell into; even Pickford, who’d become one of
the major stars of the silent era largely by knowing when to cool it, does
beaver imitations all over that artificial scenery. What saves Ramona is the beauty of the natural scenery and the uncompromising vigor with which
the story (or at least as much as Griffith and his co-writer, Stanner E. V.
Taylor, could get into a two-reeler) is told, particularly in the
no-holds-barred condemnation of the whites’ treatment of the Indians. It may
seem surprising that Griffith, whose most famous film is the openly racist The
Birth of a Nation, should be so good at
depicting the plight of oppressed people of color (he did it again in Broken
Blossoms, in which the sympathetic
victim of prejudice was Asian), but perhaps — like an earlier Virginian, Thomas
Jefferson — Griffith was able to see through the socially current prejudices
against Indians even while buying into the ones against Blacks.

Charles was
unable to make it to the Ramona screening with me, but I downloaded the film from archive.org and
showed it to him later — and the comparison was fascinating in its own right.
The print screened in Old Town was from a Milestone DVD of another, longer Mary
Pickford movie, came from Pickford’s personal print, and had excellent image
quality — far better than the archive.org download — but it also came equipped
with a really dire score, a combination of a string-heavy chamber orchestra for
some scenes and self-consciously “primitive” drumming in others. The
archive.org download also came with a soundtrack (a lot of their silent films
don’t) that began unpromisingly with a couple of typical modern-day Mexican pop
songs, complete with saccharine vocals, but then got better with a Latin guitar
instrumental that yielded to recordings of Native American chants, which
suggested how this story should be scored for film: with Latin music to represent Ramona’s upper-class Californio upbringing and gradually changing to traditional
Native music as she and Alessandro are driven farther and farther away from
civilization by the prejudices that ultimately destroy them. Not surprisingly, Ramona has been filmed several times since this version:
Michael Druxman’s 1975 book Make It Again, Sam lists three subsequent feature-length Ramonas, from 1916 by a company called Clune, directed by
Donald Crisp (mostly known as an actor) with Adda Gleason as Ramona; a 1928
version from United Artists directed by Edwin Carewe with Dolores Del Rio; and
a 1936 color version from 20th Century-Fox, directed by Henry King
with Loretta Young as star. The 1936 Ramona was actually started at Fox Film before Darryl F.
Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures took it over in a merger, and Fox
production chief Winfield Sheehan was grooming a half-American,
half-Argentinian Latina starlet named Rita Cansino for the lead — but when
Zanuck took over he fired Cansino and gave the part to Young, with whom he’d
been working ever since the early 1930’s at Warners, and Cansino’s promising
star career was derailed until she met a car salesman named Edward Judson, who
became her manager and husband, and he had her hairline raised with
electrolysis and her remaining hair dyed red, changed her last name to Hayworth
(after Haworth, her mother’s maiden name) and got her a contract with Columbia
and, ultimately, the superstardom that had eluded her at Fox.